I'm reluctant to try to give a synopsis, since the twists and turns are
part of the fun.
Plutarch mentions a war between Athens and Amazons, and Pressfield took
that ball and ran with it. He invented a culture for the Amazons, basing
it partly on other nomadic tribes and partly on the mythic image of the
female Amazon warrior. This time he doesn't forget the
centrality of religion and custom, and once again (as in Gates of Fire)
shows how an alien and sometimes horrible culture has a human core.
His theme isn't courage so much as freedom, in its several guises.

The story is set in Theseus's Athens (pre-Trojan war!), and begins with
a family who count among their servants Selene, a captive Amazon
kept as a tutor
for their daughters. She teaches them more than the father suspects (of
course) and after King Theseus (who had married the Amazon Antiope) comes
by with a message she considers the oath binding her to stay
fulfilled. She makes
mincemeat of the other slaves on the farm who try to stop her flight.

When the elder daughter takes off to try to join her the next night,
family honor demands an expedition for the recovery of them both.
Even with a sturdy crew of soldiers, they run into difficulties. And
then we hear the story of the earlier conflict as seen by Damon and by
Selene. (I guess Pressfield likes to have somebody narrate his stories.)

For some reason I had a little trouble getting into the story at first:
Selene seemed a bit unreal; but once the expedition sets out with the
reluctant younger daughter (tied so she doesn't run off too),
the story picks up. I'll not summarize--suffice it to say that once
Damon and Selene started telling their stories I didn't want to put the
book down.

The violence is graphic and extreme, so be warned. Some details don't
quite work: nobody could survive the underground battle, the coastline
is unreasonably heavily populated, etc. But the book works well, and
I recommend it.

Friday, September 12, 2003

The United Burger States of America
by Peter Biddlecombe

Up till this book I would have unhesitatingly recommended Peter Biddlecomb,
on the strength of the other four books of his I've read (Travels With My
Briefcase, French Lessons in Africa, A Nice Time Being Had By
All, and Very Funny, Now Change Me Back Again). He writes of his
travels, and as a representative of a British commercial bank he has had to
work in a great many different cities. He claims that the true traveler is
the business traveler. The vacationer can pick and chose, but the business
traveler has to immerse himself in the local culture enough to communicate and
deal with the local businessmen. Marco Polo was, after all, a business
traveler, not an adventurer.

In the earlier books Peter wrote of his own experiences, often exaggerating
or combining events for a better story. And they are good travel stories.
By all means go read one of them.

But Burger States isn't mainly about his adventures, but is mostly his
impressions and tall tales, with the occasional bitter screed tucked in here
and there. The tailor should stick to his last, and Biddlecombe should tell his
own stories.

He tried to classify the various states by food, with salad states and cheese
states and burger states, etc; which is a nice idea but not well developed.

I could not finish the book. When Franklin wrote to his European audience of
the grand spectacle of whales leaping up Niagara, he thought it was a hoot; but
it has always struck me as too dumb to be funny. Likewise this book... Maybe
Biddlecombe was trying to be a new Dave Barry? If so, he missed badly.

There are a few good spots and a few accurate lines. When visiting the Abbey
of Gethsemani (Peter says he is a Thomas Merton fan!) he writes "I've never known
so many Americans keep so quiet for so long." (For those not familiar, the Abbey
is Trappist, and Trappist monks keep a vow of silence.) But in the end I didn't
think it worth my time to finish the book, and I doubt you will either.
A pity. Go read one of his others.

Thursday, September 11, 2003

11-September-2001

I'm not the best person to write a tribute or a memorial: I
wasn't there and I didn't know anybody who was.

My life didn't change much, beyond starting to read Bernard
Lewis. A few years before a man lit a pail of gasoline in one of the
city buses, and I've been watchful since then in ways 9-11 didn't
increase.

One change galls me, though. My hope is to point
people to heaven, not hurry them to hell. Yet I find I must spend
energy trying to remind people that we have to fight the war, and
not miss the forest for the leaves. A stunning number of people
can't conceive that the Iraq campaign is just
one more campaign in a world-wide war.

The blindness isn't just a University-town effect. Most of the
Democratic candidates for president seem to have no clue at all
that we're in a major struggle, and several seem to think that
we should retreat. I'd thought better of Gore, but his pronouncements
on Iraq were ludicrous.

I see the war to come as one with pauses, where we make deals with
Beelzebub to attack Lucifer (Pakistan and Afghanistan, for example).
We'll try to make peaceable relations with Iraq and Iran (both absolutely
critical), and hope that Pakistan and Egypt can manage to reject their
jihadists. In the meantime the Saudis will keep funding the jihadist
schools churning out terrorist supporters, trying to subvert the
entire Islamic world to their Wahhabist party line. We try to win
hearts and minds from the outside, as infidels; and they try to win
from the inside. The jihadists will keep striking wherever they can,
and with the collusion of some governments (Pakistan?), use
disease and poison weapons.
One day Arabia will be partitioned into the Shi'ite
oil fields, the Jordanian holy places, and the Saudi desert; but we'll
still see decades pass before the damage done by the unholy madrassas is
undone.

With this in mind, I see blindness in other quarters as well. Winning
the war isn't a matter of "Do A, do B, send the Marines to C." We can
lose. We almost certainly will lose at least a city during the
war. And unless we have something more than mere secularism to offer,
we aren't going to win enough hearts and minds to matter.

I don't fault Bush for dealing with the Saudis--we can't attack them
directly and everybody knows it. But why not tell us we're going to
have to make some sacrifices? Where is the drive to address the
philosophical/religious issues that inspire our enemies? (Ad
campaigns about how nice life is for Muslims in the US won't cut it.)
Is anybody going to pay attention to the recruiting in our prisons
or quit cowering when CAIR glowers? And we're going to need a lot
more soldiers... not just National Guard.

And so I find myself having to call for war when I want to
call
for peace.

Understand something about scientists: They dream about making a big
break-through; with something new nobody expected before. They live
under pressure to discover. In fields where there is no easy means of
disproving a theory--where experiments are hard or impossible--you'll
find that contrarians are quite common, and theories a dime a dozen.
I think we have an instance of that here. Ancient records say Hezekiah
ordered a tunnel dug, and there's the tunnel. Ockham's rule suggests that
Hezekiah actually did order the tunnel. You can be open to the possibility
that it was an enlargement of an older structure, or that someone later
enlarged or repaired it, but I can't see why you would contend
that someone else built it, absent any other substantial evidence.

Scientists also want recognition, which is why any conspiracy theory
that requires scientists to keep secrets about 200 mpg cars is laughable.
The temptation to publish would be too great.

"The Siloam Tunnel itself remains a wonder of ancient engineering,
excavated by two teams of diggers starting at opposite ends and meeting
somehow - no-one knows how - in the middle." They didn't have good
mirrors, but mirrors they did have. I'd think of surveying-in a pipe
with a mirror to reflect skylight down the tunnel. If the mine supervisor
finds that the day's digging dims the light to one side, he could correct
that in the next day's digging. Or you could try making a surface line
from one spot to the other, and have people pound on the rock above; or
perhaps at two spots equidistant from the line and let the supervisor
try to figure which was closer.

Tuesday, September 09, 2003

Sex

It is a myth that men think of sex all the time. In fact, as any
husband knows, there's a simple test that applies: If the sky isn't
falling, surely there's time to make love? If the sky is falling,
then this is our last chance. (I know, nothing about sex is simple.)

Sunday, September 07, 2003

I hear very few Muslim voices unconditionally condemning Al Qaeda. Even
when somebody ventures a rebuke, it always seems hedged about with complaints
and excuses--usually involving the Palestinians.

Part of this is no doubt that everybody likes rooting for David against
Goliath, and its no skin off their noses if we get bruised.

Part is systematic. The worst believer is better than the best
nonbeliever.

It is an article of faith that even the most wicked believer is in a
different and better relationship to God than the most virtuous
unbeliever. Here understand unbeliever as one who has rejected the
revealed truth. The merely ignorant are in a rather different class.
Because your relationship with God is infinitely more important than your
relationship to anyone or anything else, if follows that even a wicked
believer is better before God than the most virtuous person who rejects God.
Note that there is a slight difference between my statement
and the title.

While a Christian might object that you can't hate your visible brother
and still love the invisible God, Christians also hold that believers are
better before God than rejectionist unbelievers.

There is no point in trying to challenge this doctrine. That a supernatural
relationship is established between God and His worshipers is central to
Islam, and to Christianity, and a number of other revealed religions as well.
While several Christian denominations deny this, close examination shows that
they have departed from orthodoxy in many other particulars as well and do
not reflect traditional Christianity.

Who is competent to judge who is a believer and who is not? Christianity
and Islam nominally provide different answers to this question--after all,
Jesus warned that not everyone who called Him Lord was one of His; while
anyone who pronounces the formula is Muslim. In practice when clerics
dominate we tend to see the same sort of assumptions in both--either you
see an inclusionist "If you do the basics you are a real zzz" or you see
a heretic-hunting "If you don't do the details you're not a real zzz."
In either case the clerics feel competent to judge, and everyone else
can follow their lead. This attitude isn't quite as unjustifiable as it
might appear, since the proper relationship with God ought to properly
order the rest of one's life (sooner or later), and this can be dramatic.
We can easily distinguish between Mother Theresa and John Wayne Gacy.

Still, this judgment can look like a usurpation of God's prerogative.

What are the practical consequences of the attitude that a believer is
better before God than an unbeliever? First notice that if I am competent
to judge who is a true believer and who is not, then I can safely say that a
believer is better than a unbeliever. Second, the more tightly coupled all
aspects of the law are, the larger will be the differences between believer
and unbeliever. Commonly a believer's testimony carries more weight than
an unbeliever's, who already shows a disregard for the Truth. It just
gets worse from there, with greater and greater disabilities applied to
the unbeliever. Sharia notoriously couples all aspects of law, but the
lack of divine authority to oppress unbelievers hasn't always hobbled
Christians either. (Of course in Hinduism, where it is impossible to
change your religious status, the restrictions on non-Brahmans
enforce a permanent and particularly noxious caste system.)

We have a secular society for a number of reasons, including the rise of
atheism/secularism, the ascendancy of philosophies that despair of finding
absolute truth, a history of bitter experience of religious wars, and a
little sentence of Jesus' about giving Caesar what was his and God what
was His. The secular society shows some great advantages, even though
it has some shortcomings.
In fact our society is very aggressively materialist and
anti-religious, unless those religions are willing to become materialist
and un-dogmatic. This doesn't seem to endear us to Muslims.

I take it as given that a materialist or un-dogmatic religion isn't worth
the water to flush it. Attempts to make Islam un-dogmatic I believe must
fail at the best, and backfire at the worst. Orthodox Islam is always going
to hold that a believer is in a special relationship to God.

At the other end of the chain we find that Islam
so tightly couples all aspects of law under divine authority that it seems
inevitable that unbelievers must be treated worse than believers.

I think the weakest link in this chain is the assumption that a human
can judge if another person is a true believer. If you lie while
pronouncing the Muslim formula, are you really a Muslim? Is rebellion
against the laws of God kin to apostasy?

These subtle points are not useless speculation. We want Muslims
to despise evil-doers who injure infidels just as they despise evil-doers
who injure Muslims. The more they blindly hang together against the infidel
(us), the more cover and scope the bin Ladens have. They should not usurp
God's prerogative of final judgment, and restrict themselves to what a
human can judge. A little
uncertainty about who is honestly Muslim seems compatible with some of
the hadiths I've seen.

We need to persuade them that this is Islamic and pious.

We would like Muslims to have the benefits of a secular society (preferably
without the evils). They won't accept it unless a secular law is a
logical consequence of Islam, or at least not in conflict with it.

We need to encourage them to find the way.

Where can we find scholars willing to study Islam and its expressions
who are unafraid to challenge foolish implementations? Perhaps we can't find
enough left in the West, but maybe there are some bold souls within Islam
willing to ask the loyal but hard questions.

Friday, September 05, 2003

Monday, September 01, 2003

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
Vol 1
by Moore and O'Neill

I heard the movie was a turkey, but the "graphic novels" it was
based on were supposed to be pretty good. The premise sounded
amusing: collect a disparate crew of heroes from popular novels of
the nineteenth century and give them some common task.

It took a while for the library copy to get around to me, hence
the lateness of this review. (Yes, I'm a cheapskate.)

In brief: lots of detail (good), lots of attention to
detail (very good), lots of references to literature (amusing), lots of
plot twists, and only about half of the characters are satisfactorily
rendered (the Invisible Man, for one). I suppose some of the
failures in rendering are inevitable--some of the characterizations
in the books rely on the texture of the original author's prose.
But I'm afraid I just don't believe their Nemo.

The (text) back story at the end, apparently intended to explain
how Quartermain wound up an addict, is unreadable. While not the
worst fan fiction I've ever run across ... well, I couldn't finish
it. I skimmed a passage here and there. Why Lovecraft?

I'll only recommend this for fans of the genre. The rest of us
can continue to live joyful and contented lives without reading it.
(No, it is not for kids.)

If there are this many Harleys in Madison, what must it be like
in Milwaukee? I heard that all the hotels and campsites were full
in Milwaukee, so aficionados were sleeping as far away as Madison and
commuting to the events.

I dunno what the police thought, but all the riders I ran
across were courteous.

Motorcycles aren't high on my wish list: maybe because of
all those years of riding on dirt roads. I learned that
when another car approached you had to roll up the windows
quickly to keep crud from hitting you in the face. I like windshields.
And you can't carry very many bags of groceries on a cycle.
Still, if I ever found I needed one I'd look at a Harley first.
True, it sounds like the motor is coughing up phlegm, but its almost a
human sound compared to the other sounds of the road, and I see why
people like it.

Four of us went to campus to try to see Mars Wednesday night.
The line for the observatory was easily a block and a half long,
and I found out the next day that they only took the first 200
and turned back at least 300. Luckily I remembered the old
observatory on top of Sterling.

I called from my office to say where we were going, and yep,
the light was on in the dome. Up to the roof, where a stiff
breeze was making the youngest daughter bitterly regret her
summer outfit. Alas, the grad student manning the refractor
hadn't used it before, and was yanking it this way and that
staring through the main scope. Someone more experienced suggested
that using the spotter scope was a good idea, as was putting
eyepieces in the various scopes. (Yes, he had taken the
lens cap off.) Still no joy. I was close to offering my services
when a researcher took pity on us and offered to let us look through
his scope in a nearby dome. His was a much more compact reflector,
but with twice the diameter.

He tried to show our little group of 17 a globular cluster first,
but my youngest son was first in line, couldn't see well, and grabbed
the scope for balance. Sic transit globular cluster. The dome
rotated smoothly around as
the long-suffering researcher looked for Mars. He spent most of his
time punching buttons on some kind of special calculator, which I
guess must translate coordinates and time into a direction for the
scope.

The magnification was no bigger than on our little scope at home,
but it was far brighter, and the colors weren't those of the rainbow.
Mars was clear and beautiful--wobbling a bit because of the wind
shaking the building. We all looked a couple of times, thanked our
host, and trekked our separate ways.

And, of course, what better treat to end an outing with than
ice cream?